Political Economy of the Middle East this Fall

from Donna Lee Bowen, director of the MESA degree and member of the IR committee:

MESA is offering a mini-course on Foundations of Middle East Economics. Jamal Qureshi, SAIS graduate and oil analyst will explore the principles that underlie Middle East politics.

International Relations and Political Science students are welcome to enroll.

The course will be .5 credit hours and will run September 28-30 from 5:30-8 p.m.

"Follow The Money: Understanding The Economic Underpinnings of the Middle East" Jamal Qureshi presents a survey of the basic economic structures of the Middle East which includes the role of oil, population and demographic change, labor issues, water shortages, challenges in agriculture and so forth. He connects these phenomena to the political and social structures prevalent in the area and unpacks the challenges resulting from these economic factors. Qureshi’s goal is to give students a basic toolkit for understanding how the financial and economic lifeblood of the region works and how they can then use that as a tool to better understand things which they might otherwise tend to see from more one-dimensional political or cultural angles. This mini-course will help de-mystify the region and help deconstruct the fatal tendency to see the Middle East as the "other". Instead he will present an area that at its core operates on the same basic human dynamics as anywhere else.

Jamal Qureshi is a 1998 graduate of BYU with a BA in Near Eastern Studies and an Arabic minor. He is married with three children and served in the England London Mission from 1995-1997. After spending a year studying Arabic on a Fulbright grant at the American University in Cairo (AUC), he went on to obtain his M.A. in International Relations and Economics from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington DC. Born in Colorado and having lived in numerous places in the US, he has also spent many years abroad living in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Palestine, the UK, and Norway. His decade of professional experience includes having worked at the US State and Treasury departments, ExxonMobil's public affairs division, as the lead oil market analyst at consultancy PFC Energy in Washington DC, as the on-desk fundamentals analyst for Barclays Capital's crude and oil products traders in New York City, as a fundamentals analyst and hedge fund liaison at Hess Energy Trading Company (Hetco) in New York City, and now as the lead crude oil and refining trading analyst for Statoil (the Norwegian state oil company) in Stavanger, Norway. While oil markets are his specific professional niche, he considers participation in these markets an ideal perch for gaining a broader understanding of the interaction of markets, economics, politics, and the struggles of the developing world.